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>What have we done since the Apollo program was canceled early? Nothing as notable. Their robotic missions have been hugely successful. Consider just the numb
by oofabz 10y ago
>What have we done since the Apollo program was canceled early? Nothing as notable.
Their robotic missions have been hugely successful.
Consider just the number of them: Viking, Voyager, Galileo, Deep Space, Cassini, New Horizons, Dawn, Kepler, and Juno. That's not even counting our many Mars probes. It's pretty impressive to launch a new interplanetary probe that frequently, and every one of them accomplished its mission.
We have now sent probes to every planet in the Solar System, two dwarf planets, asteroids, and comets. If we are still in an era where crewed interplanetary travel is impractical, we're making the most of it with these uncrewed missions.
- Grishnakh 10y agoAnd how many of those probes required entirely new rocket technology, instead of being launched on top of a system designed decades ago to launch ICBMs? Probes are nice for science, but they really don't inspire people the way manned flights, space stations, etc. do. Nor do they require nearly as many resources; they comparatively cheap and simple. The resources poured into Apollo were enormous, and the technologies derived were hugely significant. What technologies were derived from New Horizons? Probably none. I'm not saying it shouldn't have been launched; it was absolutely a worthy project. But it just doesn't compare to Apollo in any way. So as I said before: "nothing as notable".